Book Review

In her mid-30s, Emily Dickinson stopped binding her poems into tidy, inked fascicles, and around the same time, she developed an eye condition that required her to stay for long periods in darkness. She wrote poems in pencil (at her doctor’s request) on scraps of envelope paper (an original choice).

The relationship between these events is a complex one, but I was not surprised when it emerges, halfway through Ethel Rackin’s newest and fourth collection of poetry, In Time—in a passing reference to carrying a volume of “E.D’s envelope poems” through a period of crisis. What else would serve, in a collection like this, as the model for a kind of fragmentation of persistence—a splintering that allows for biding time, and passing through?

Rackin is the author of a series of small press poetry collections, including The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013), Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), and Evening (Furniture Press, 2017), as well as the creative writing pedagogy text Crafting Poems and Stories (Broadview Press, 2024). In Time joins this procession as the kind of book that lives with the author through a dark season, the manifestation of a slow desire named in “The Tortoise”: “What did I want to do when I came back to write—to detail the drift.” As the images compile, the speaker is often riven by the impossibility of creating new images in the dark, as she describes in “Silk Road”:

for winter’s just a metaphor

for the kind of loss

we figure on—

forgive me

friends.

Rather than “figuring” this season as a passage, however, Rackin is invested in In Time clarifying the experience of waiting as a high-stakes “plunge.”

The book takes the form of three sections—“Homecoming,” “Underwood,” and “Lately”—which experiment with different manifestations of survival and loss. Early in the collection, a series of dated “Recovered Dailies” tackles the quotidian arts of grief, naming and prodding at the annoyances of boots and pains, the presence of the body as “a trace of what / I was.” Later, the book turns to more transformative efforts at adaptation in landscapes of surreal survivalism; in poems like “Island Life,” Rackin follows a first-person chorus as they seek narrative sustenance for their plight:

While we were in prison we kept staring at each other

and telling our stories of miraculous things

that had happened to us before this befell us.

We kept ourselves alive this way—recounting the exact sounds

In “Forge,” which provides another instruction manual for departure from modern life, Rackin’s closural couplets enact a sort of countdown from our lives, alongside the planet: “There will not always be water,” she reminds, “There will not always be string.” The book’s final poems return to sources of connection and futurity, as in “This Late,” which ends with a syntactically open invocation of hope “if we’re not careful / if it’s still possible.”

In Time is at its best when its sources of sharpness collide. In the very funny “New Rules,” for instance, the speaker’s identification with survivalist animals trespasses into the world of the mundane:

And where was I on the new rules

which side would I come down on

I guess I was annoyed

like any animal who has to work

to keep bones in the refrigerator

and pick up so many things each

and every day

In the face of these collisions and blurrings, perhaps another way to describe this book is as a work of provisionality, both in the sense of adaptation and of stocking up. Rackin is invested in a mode of intellectualized negative capability that endures, as she describes in “Inquiry”: “I mean, at least it’s a way of thinking.” The poems refill on the sustenance of good friends marking time with Hanukkah candles, with letters detailing funeral arrangements, and recounting a mysterious and distressing forest sound in “MacDowell Woods”: “something inside was breaking / or was it writhing—rising—writing—/ righting itself against the night?” The connections through and because of pain are part of the poet’s resolution. Perhaps no poem so fully explores the value of transformative loss as the opening poem of the collection, “The Greening,” which defamiliarizes an idyllic green landscape until “most of the hues were / sickly holograms of their former selves.”  Amidst this “sea / of green,” the images that persist—of sustenance, quiet, and even of chilling cold—provide shocking periods of respite. There are still Dickinson poems to carry. There are still moments, like “Noon,” in which “the sun shone on the dog’s fur / when she sat in exactly the right spot.”

In In Time, Rackin offers us a work that does not shy in its desire for accompaniment. Looking forward, it nevertheless resists making explicit meaning from the drifting losses of the years. Instead, it honors their individual, striking pain. Perhaps the best thing Rackin does in this book is not to offer to save us from any of it, but simply to name, as in “January,” what cannot be understood:

To say I felt a loss wasn’t exactly it.

It’s just that a wind blew

and I wasn’t sure where it was

coming from.